11 March 2015
Manmohan Sing is an impeccable intellectual. In political terms he was a failure. During his second term in office he let things loose. He was unable to control his ministers. There were too many scams- 2G Scam, CWG Scam, Oil Scam, MNREGA Scam, Adarsh Scam and in Cash For Vote Scam. Three of his ministers were sent to jail.
On Wednesday a special court charged former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with corruption and criminal conspiracy and ordered him to appear before the court on 8 April 2015. The case is in connection with the allocation of Talabira II coal block in Odisha to Hindalco in 2005, when MR. Singh was holding the coal portfolio. Kumarmangalam Birla is multi-billionaire head of Hindalco Industries.
You can get more details of coal scam from corruptionarchive.net article – India: Biggest scam ever reported.
Hindalco officials Shubhendu Amitabh and D Bhattacharya have also been summoned along with Dr. Singh. Kumarmangalam Birla is said to have had a meeting with Dr. Singh and the then Coal Secretary, P C Parakh.
Industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, ex-coal secretary P C Parakh and three others were also asked to appear in court on the same day. Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) claimed that there was no prosecutable evidence against Singh or others embroiled in the case and filed a closure report. The court refused the closure of the case and ordered CBI to examine former Prime Minister Singh and some top officials of then Prime Minister Office (PMO), including Singh’s then Principal Secretary T K A Nair and then private secretary B V R Subramanyam.
Last year the Supreme Court scrapped all 218 allocations of coal reserves from 1993 to 2010 on grounds that they were allocated under procedures that were arbitrary and lacked fairness and transparency.
It was the sheer persistence of the judiciary that brings these culprits to justice. Otherwise CBI would have hushed up this case on grounds that there was insufficient prosecutable evidence.
